Command-LIne Projects

1. Site Connectivity Checker

Project Details: When we visit a URL or a website, most of the time we get the information whatever we need on our browser. Sometimes websites can be down and it can give some error message in the browser. This might happen due to some server issue. Here you can showcase your skill and build a site connectivity checker. A site connectivity checker gives the status of a website, visiting the URL. It visits the URL at regular intervals and returns the results of each visit. Instead of visiting the URLs manually to check the site status, you can use this tool to monitor multiple websites from one page.

Technical Details: The main goal  is to check the status of a website. To implement this feature you can use TCP or ICMP for your connection. Socket programming in python will help you to make the connection. Use socket module in Python and to learn more about socket programming visit the link Python Socket or Python network programming . User should be able to add and remove sites from the list of sites to be checked. You can use docopt, click, or argparse frameworks to add commands for these features. Keep in mind that user should be capable to start the tool, stop it and determine the intervals. You also need to save the list of the files checked and to do this you can use sqlite3 module of SQLite database. 

Additional Challenge:  User needs to keep checking the command line to check the status of the site. To avoid this you can add notification feature (Ex: a sound played in the background) to alert the user when a site’s status changes. Maintain the previous status of a site in your database because that’s the only way the tool can tell when the status changes.

Real Life Examples:

• Uptrends
• Site24X7

2. File Renaming Tool

Project Details: A lot of time we need to rename the files in our directory according to certain conventions. For example, File001.jpg, File002.jpg, File003.jpg, and this goes on. Doing this task manually can be repetitive and boring. To avoid this manual work, you can create a tool to rename a large number of files. 

Technical Details: The main goal is to create a tool to rename files without mistakes in a couple of seconds. To rename the target files, you can use  os, sys, and shutil libraries available in Python. Users should be able to pass the naming convention of their own choice to rename all the files in the directory. Here the regex module will help match the required naming patterns if you know how regex works. If a user pass naming convention such as myfiles as part of the commands then the tool should rename the files like myfiles123, where 123 is a number. 

Additional Challenge: Implement a feature that allow users to choose only certain number of files for renaming, instead of all the files. For this feature the tool will sort the files based on alphabetical order, time of file creation, or file size, depending on the user’s requirements.

Real Life Examples:

• Rename
• Ren Command

Python in the world of programming everyone is familiar with the popularity of this language. Learning python and building the project is always an amazing experience for developers. This language really deserves hype in today’s era and why not if it can solve a lot of real-world problems. Well, every programmer’s journey starts with learning the basics of any programming language and once they move ahead they realize the importance of building the projects using the same language. They become curious to know how things work in some applications and they try to get some practical exposure to expand their knowledge by building some cool projects. If you’re a developer then learning the syntax of a language is not enough….it’s important to know that how the concepts of a language can be applied to solve some real-world problems or challenges. Well, python is not an exception. 

Python is a very powerful language and the best thing is it’s easy to learn. You can build a lot of cool stuff using this language. So don’t just get stuck on theoretical concepts. Once you know the basics of this language, go ahead, explore, find out some good projects to work on, and get some practical exposure. In programming always remember that getting hands-on experience is the best way to strengthen your knowledge.   Today in this blog we are going to discuss some projects you can work on as an intermediate Python developer. These projects are not too hard and not too easy. There will be some challenges while building these projects and you will really enjoy solving those problems. We have divided the projects into three categories…

1. Web Applications: Basically developers are responsible for building both the front-end and back-end part of the application. As a python developer, your main focus would be back-end part where all the business logic gets implemented. You can use some Python web frameworks such as Django and Flask.
2. Desktop GUI: You can make your own Desktop Graphical User Interface application using Python. PySimpleGUI is one of the user friendly framework for Desktop applications. PyQt5 is another advanced powerful GUI framework but it has steep learning curve.
3. Command-Line: Command line applications work in a console window. You can use docopt, argparse, and click frameworks to build your applications.

Now let’s discuss some projects for all the above three categories one by one…